57% of Americans: Traitors?
If you are to believe the President of the United States, more than half the American population is now flirting with treason. In his new, and strategically disastrous, mode of ultra-polarization, the President is pushing back against war critics and, sadly, questioning their loyalty.
In the worst sort of demagogy, President Bush – in a speech at an Alaskan air base on Monday —first feinted that his mind was open to discussion and then landed his sucker punch:
"Reasonable people can disagree about the conduct of the war, but it is irresponsible for Democrats to now claim that we misled them and the American people… some Democrats who voted to authorize the use of force are now rewriting the past. They are playing politics with this issue and sending mixed signals to our troops and the enemy."
Translation: Sure you can disagree with me. But if you do, you’re undermining our troops and giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
Sorry, my conservative friends, but this is filth. A disgusting assertion beneath the stature of any American President. For those on the Right who recoil at over-the-top lefty characterizations of Bush as an idiot, a fascist or some sort of criminal conspirator, here is your President frolicking around in the same sort of rhetorical gutter.
Problem for Bush is, that according to one poll after another, a clear-cut majority of Americans believe that Bush has “misled” the country into the war in Iraq. So by the President’s own logic, somewhere between 52-57% of Americans are now “sending mixed signals to our troops and the enemy.”
Traitorous bastards! Perhaps time has come for Dubya to take that Brechtian step of dismissing the people and electing a new one.
If so, he better hurry. Those latest polls reveal not only that the hapless Bush has dipped to an all time low 37% favorability rating, but that his senior partner in government, Dick Cheney, has crashed the 30% barrier and now registers a stunning 29% favorability rating. Then there’s this bauble tucked away in the poll numbers per CNN’s report:
"Only 9 percent said their first choice in next year's elections would be a Republican who supports Bush on almost every major issue."
That’s right. Less than one in ten Americans – including 70% of GOP voters—now say they want to support someone other than a Bush Republican (Nifty work, Karl!). Someone is giving Bush some really terrible advice. His new finger-pointing act isn’t gonna cut it. The inescapable impression is that this administration is now dead in the water and we are about to experience three years of paralysis and accelerated decay. As David Corn tightly argues, it’s Bush, not his opposition that is rewriting history. The primary responsibility for the endless war in which are now enmeshed resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
There were, however, 29 Democrats who voted with 48 Republicans for the war authorization measure in late 2002, including 2004 Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards. So did Hilary and most of the rest of the current Democratic Leadership.
Their responsibilities in this mess may be secondary but have, nevertheless, grave consequences. They can split hairs over how much they were led around by the nose –or not—by the administration’s snow job during the run-up to war. But it’s undeniable that people who you would think should know better, went ahead and gave Bush the blank check for war out of sheer fear and political opportunism.
If Bush is grossly re-writing history, the Dems are, at least, fudging it. Leading Democrats now argue that they were shown only intelligence that claimed the existence of WMD in Iraq and that – if they had somehow know the deeper truth—they would have never voted their assent to war.
Baloney. The issue three years ago wasn’t whether or not Saddam might be building up WMD. Bush is actually correct when he says most people assumed he was to some degree or another. I certainly did. The issue was, rather, WHAT should be done about it? The anti-war voices at the time argued that even if Saddam had “the nuts” – as they say at the poker table — he was simultaneously contained, restrained and boxed -- in by international scrutiny; that the UN inspections process should be escalated and tightened; that under no discernible circumstances was their a necessity for the immediate war that Bush was pushing.
Those critics were right. Bush was wrong. So were Kerry, Edwards and Clinton. One reason that Bush’s collapse is not automatically converting into a Democratic bonanza is that a lot of Americans still can’t distinguish between the war policies of the two parties. And who can blame them?
November 14th, 2005 at 9:38 pm
I concur. We were right then, and now. The shill job had the dems sign on, but there seems to be other information cited by the prez they didn’t see. Still, as I’ve said the authorization was signed as an “If Neccessary,” proposal. He grabbed the signatures and ran when it wasn’t indeed necessary. That’s pure shillery.
November 14th, 2005 at 9:45 pm
> he was simultaneously contained, restrained
> and boxed — in by international scrutiny; that
> the UN inspections process should be
> escalated and tightened; that under no
> discernible circumstances was their a necessity > for the immediate war
Who’s rewriting history, Marc? In 2002, if you’ll recall, *German* intelligence stated that Saddam could have a nuke as early as the following year. One of our top allies telling us that Saddam was imminently close to acquiring a nuke doesn’t qualify as a discernible circumstance?
The Duelfer report makes it plain that Saddam had no intention whatsoever with ever fully cooperating with international inspectors, wanting to always leave doubt that he still had a ready reserve of WMD. (Primarily to intimidate Iran, as it turns out.) We now know any inspection regimen would have inevitably led to a painful stalemate.
Meanwhile, please acknowledge that the containment policy was *the* prime recruitment tool for Bin Laden. As his main cause, he wanted infidel US soldiers out of Saudi Arabia– and they were there *to contain Saddam*. Bin Laden was galvanizing support in the Muslim world by procliaming deaths of thousands of Iraqis from UN sanctions as another core grievance– another element put in place *to contain Saddam*. After 9/11, it was clear that the containment policy might have been containing Saddam, but it was also fueling extremist hatred of the US.
Again, Marc, who’s rewriting history? Can’t you at least acknowledge there was indeed a reasonable case for the post-9/11 necessity of confroting Saddam ASAP?
November 14th, 2005 at 11:13 pm
I think it’s clear from the context of Bush’s remarks that he was fingering Democrat legislators, not Democrats in general. While the polls are unambiguously pointing to a majority believing that the White House misled them
http://www.pollingreport.com/iraq.htm
they also point to some other interesting majorities:
- People think that news reporting about Iraq is too negative (52%, with a big chunk saying “balanced”)
- People think that U.S. forces should be kept there until stability is restored (52%, though the trend is definitely downward), and the real kicker ….
- In answer to the question “Do you think Americans who describe U.S. military action in Iraq as a mistake are helping or hurting U.S. troops on the ground there?”, 58% said “hurting”.
The White House still has the Democratic Party over a barrel — most voters may feel comfortable telling a pollster and their friends that the country was misled into Iraq. But most don’t want politicians saying it. The White House is following these polls closely. So are Democrat legislators.
Let’s face it — politicians are very much in the business of getting reelected, and with the exception of the President, they don’t get reelected by the whole country. They win when they vote pork for their constituencies. As for the more national-level expenditures, while many pols might rail publicly against the octopus of DC bureaucracy, they actually like those huge, unwieldy, unfeeling bureaucracies, because every time one of their staffers intervenes personally in response to a voter’s irate letter about real or imagined mistreatment by a government agency, the politician becomes a hero not only to the beleaguered petitioner, but to everyone else that voter knows — often regardless of party affiliation.
The Big Issues aren’t like pork and casework. The Big Issues are so often no-win for politicians. All politics is local, and all votes are personal. So what Bush is saying here translates into a pretty amazing but paradoxically effective statement:
“Reasonable people might disagree about whether we lied to them, but who in their right mind wouldn’t Support Our Troops?”
Since everybody knows somebody whose cousin is in the armed forces, this makes it personal. And local. With poll numbers like his, Bush could hardly have said anything else more effective for maintaining what little support he still has.
The sad part: it’s likely to work, at least for a while yet. The chattering classes (that’s me, too) can jibe that Max Boot and Niall Ferguson should have “I’d rather be embracing imperialism” bumper stickers, and might as well be shacked up together, but that’s so much pissing in the wind — your average voter isn’t paying attention to those debates. Britain increasingly democratized even as it made sure the sun wouldn’t set on its empire, because it was a nation of shopkeepers who wanted the system to continue delivering the goods. The latterday American democratic imperative might have something more to do with filling a car’s gas tank without either undue wallet pinch or a sense of shame about the ultimate source of the hydrocarbons. But it will serve. And the Democrats have to be democrats, don’t they? Most important, they have to get reelected.
November 15th, 2005 at 12:34 am
Coop & All:
This isn’t fair. I’m 3 time zones ahead, it’s past 2am, and I’m dead tired…just had to clean out the damn email after a 14 hour day… now Mr. C, you’re firing flares over the barricades…
I thought WJA and M. Turner make strong cases above….
WJA: glad you mentioned the Duefler report… I would continue on & add that the D-report did indeed take up the UN inspection process that Mr. C. states above. But how can you talk about the inspection process, Mr. C, without talking about the sanctions? The sanctions weren’t leveled on Saddam for no reason, no? The D-Report also confirmed that the sanctions were the very levers that Saddam used to manipulate the int’l comm. w/ oil kickbacks, skimmed $billions & starve Iraqis to death with. Half a million children, 2,700 to 5,300 died every month… and this fact only led the NYT to proclaim that the UN inspection were working and “nonviolent” (!)…So, Mr. C, WHEN should we have gotten on to the fighting with Saddam? A million dead kids? Twice as many countries humiliated in the oil for food scandal?
I’m sure I’m missing a couple of grammar transmissions in above paragraph…and there where a couple top-shelf points Mr. T made that raised an eye…but I gotta lower some lids.
November 15th, 2005 at 12:41 am
What’s all this got to do with Hugo Chavez?
Ahem, sorry.
As the wagons circle around Bush and his dwindling group of supporters, it is inevitable that he will engage in increasingly desperate rhetoric such as his recent speeches. Given how out of touch with reality he has always been, and with three full years left until the next election, I am concerned about his longterm mental state. Watch for signs of nervous breakdown as things continue to deteriorate (I am serious here!)l
November 15th, 2005 at 1:11 am
On the issue of what we knew about WMD: As I pointed out some months ago, the late Robin Cook made a speech in the British parliament just before the war in which he questioned the WMD claim.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2858957.stm
As foreign secretary, a post from which he resigned shortly before this speech, Cook had access to all the intelligence that Tony Blair was relying on for his decisions to go to war. This speech was well publicized. At the very least, it should have made clear that there were serious doubts about the claims and Bush and Blair were making.
November 15th, 2005 at 1:38 am
Marc,
Off-topic, sorry. Have you been getting my emails? I think I might be in your spam folder again. Please check and get back to me. Thanks!
November 15th, 2005 at 2:07 am
There is no doubt that Democrats like John Kerry, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton have little excuse for their votes on the War Resolution and it is disengenuous to suggest that the resolution was anything but. Still, we should renenber that 22 Dem Senators voted “NO” and so did a majority of Democratic House members including Nancy Pelosi, the Leader.
Still what is your alternative? John Edwards has now written that he was wrong. Does his vote make him a permanent leper? Or does he get another chance now that he admits error. After all, he is the only major political figure to actually seem to give a damn about the “Other America” and that ought to count for something. Even John Kerry has given speeches in the past week that come pretty close to a mea culpa and he sure blasted Bush today (Nov 14) on the Senate Floor. I won’t mention Wes Clark but I will point out that Al Gore came out firmly against our Mesopotamian Madness in a speech delivered in Sept of 2002 that got scant coverage in the media – MSNBC covered part of it live which is where I saw it. I wish Gore would run, wish he had run last time. If ever anyone could say “I told you so” . . .
But he won’t and that is because too many people like you and the Great and the Good in the DC and NY Media spent two years trashing him. And all the good “Progressives” flocked to Nader because there was “no difference.” And still not a single word of apology for a gigantic error.
So again I ask Marc. If not the Democrats then Who? If people like you don’t get involved then we may see a race in 2008 between Hillary “stay the course” Clinton and John “send more troops” McCain with both arguing how to “Win” in Iraq. And then those three in five who are now disgusted will have no voice and electoral democracy becomes the sick joke the Left has always believed it to be.
November 15th, 2005 at 2:16 am
By the way, Niall Ferguson has written some interesting books that are thoughtful on the subject of WWI and Imperialism. I found them highly worthwhile even where I disagreed. But you don’t dismiss his defense of the British Empire lightly as he makes a strong case; similiarly his argument that Britain should have stayed out of the Great War has a lot of merit.
And he is appalled by this gang in Washington and their misadventures in the Middle East.
November 15th, 2005 at 2:31 am
Richard asks: “If not the Democrats then Who?”
I think that this is a totally legitimate question, and the one that those of us on the left (with apologies to bloggers here from the right, who should thank us for such glimpses into our internal debates) need to face. If we are talking about reforming or “taking back” the Democratic Party, advocates of this strategy have to be convincing that it is really possible. The experiences with Gore and Kerry, and now the talk of Hillary, are evidence to me that it might not be. Can we imagine a Kucinich candidacy? If, however, the Democratic Party cannot be reformed, then we must take a long term view and that means a third party. And recent history shows that the Democrats only move to the left if there is a serious threat of a third party taking away votes–and even then they don’t necessarily do so. I have argued here before that the leaders of the Democratic Party would rather lose election after election than take any positions that go against the corporate interests that support them. So the onus is on both sides of this debate within the left to come up with a winning strategy, whether it be short term or long term.
November 15th, 2005 at 2:49 am
WJA, apparently not stung much from citing a Susan (“Mikey”) Schreiber story in the WaPo as definitive when in fact WaPo was forced to back away from it, now offers us this:
“In 2002, if you’ll recall, *German* intelligence stated that Saddam could have a nuke as early as the following year. One of our top allies telling us that Saddam was imminently close to acquiring a nuke doesn’t qualify as a discernible circumstance?”
German intelligence stated only that Iraq had enough uranium for purposes of making a bomb (IF they could process it — see the aluminum tubes fiasco for why they couldn’t). And given how much yellowcake Iraq was left with even after the inspectors were done shutting labs down and shipping stuff out, this was hardly surprising news The claim that Iraq could have a bomb by 2003 wasn’t made by the Germans. It was made by a scientist who worked for about two decades in nuclear labs in Iraq, but who never really got anywhere near making bombs because … well, he was deathly afraid of radiation (and electrical shocks, too, by the way.) He preferred scribbling away on unrelated theoretical problems. This didn’t stop Khidhir Hamza from promoting himself as “Saddam’s Bombmaker”, after he left Iraq in 1994, nor did it keep him from noticing that the more alarmist he became in his claims, the more books he sold. Where he once contented himself with warning that Iraq might have some bombs within ten years, it soon became three (though I don’t think he ever publicly committed to a one-year timeline.)
http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2002/Khidhir-Hamza-Lies27nov02.htm
So if Marc were to “recall” any such “German intelligence”, he’d be about as hazy (or fast and loose with the facts) as WJA is himself.
“The Duelfer report makes it plain that Saddam had no intention whatsoever with ever fully cooperating with international inspectors, wanting to always leave doubt that he still had a ready reserve of WMD. (Primarily to intimidate Iran, as it turns out.) We now know any inspection regimen would have inevitably led to a painful stalemate.”
“Plain”? In its section on interview methodology for former regime members, the Duelfer report cautions: “…. the reader should keep in mind the Arab proverb: ‘Even a liar tells many truths.’” Among these truths: an Iran that felt threatened by Iran before Gulf War I would have felt even more threatened afterward, when it had been substantially disarmed. A clean bill of health from arms inspectors would have been greated with sighs of relief in Tehran — and perhaps renewed instigation of unrest among Iraqi Shi’ites, the proximate rationale for Iraq’s attack on Iran in the Iran-Iraq War. To imagine that the Iraqi government had on the one hand, put Iran out of its mind, and on the other, was brewing some WMD for an attack on the U.S., is just plain silly. “As it turned out”? Oh, come on — “as it had always been.”
The Bush administration didn’t sell the invasion of Iraq with any compelling geostrategic logic, even if such logic was driving the initiative. They sold mushroom clouds on U.S. soil and an Al Qaeda link that didn’t exist until an invasion created it. Continued “stalemated” inspections and continued ambiguity would have served for maintaining regional stability — so long as the inspectors were looking, and so long as Saddam was hinting, Iran would have reason to fear. No, there were other reasons for desiring closure (if you call fighting this endless insurgency “closure”), but they didn’t form a sales pitch.
“After 9/11, it was clear that the containment policy might have been containing Saddam, but it was also fueling extremist hatred of the US.”
And the U.S. occupation of Iraq is not? Out of the frying pan, into the fire — as Bin Laden and his ilk would prefer, since the recruiting value of hated U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia that most Saudi subjects never saw is nothing compared to the recruiting value of live-fire Jihad in the Arab world against the Infidel. There was plenty of fuel for that fire already, but we weren’t fully available to be cooked in it. Now we only have more fuel, adn we are being cooked. Funny how that works.
So maybe it’s not really about how hated we are. Maybe it’s pretty much what Colin Powell admitted at one point: it’s about the chance of having a stable, friendly oil-supplier in a Middle East that’s likely to hate us no matter what. Which may come down to us calling some puppet cabinet-in-exile in Kirkuk the “legitimate” government of Iraq — because, after all, that would still guarantee access to an amount of oil whose value greatly exceeds what’s been invested in this adventure so far.
November 15th, 2005 at 3:01 am
For more on why I am down on the Democrats please go to this link:
http://www.michaelbalter.com/Civilizations/11_14_2005|Bill_Clinton,_Romeo_Dallaire,_and_Rwanda.php
November 15th, 2005 at 3:19 am
It is hard to believe we are still having this debate after 3 years. You can just smell another national election just around the corner and the political blood letting, even at the expense of the actual blood letting of a nation in an actual war, that must have selfish priority. Disgusting, and why I detest politicians and all selfish self-serving I-want-my-way me me me adolescent losers.
Of course the president embellished the significance of the Intel at hand in order to deal with the middle east menace, while our troops were in the area and the weather time frame, both in Washington and actually on the ground, was limited. You have to be naive not to know this. But did he know this creep who hated us did NOT have chemical WMD and nuclear knowledge that could easily end up in the hands of the other super creep who hated us even more? Of course not. No one having a presidents responsibility after 9/11 would have taken that risk either. And it is not easy to take a country to war, necessary or not. Just ask Roosevelt.
This is what the debate ought to be about. Would you have taken the risk the crazies would not have lethal gas to bring into the NY Subways off and on for the next 10 years at anytime of their chosing? I don’t think so. And is there any one of the Bush Lied, Bush Stole the Election, Bush Chimpers here who would not be standing tall and strong against the Republican party and press if Gore had won in 2000 and made the same perfectly reasonable decisions Bush made after 9/11? Hell no and you damn well know it. Just because you can’t see yourself in the mirror doesn’t mean your also naive.
So sip-it-up, suck-it-up, sit-on–it and find some other way to win in 2006. Support your country in a war that must be won, and you know it. Your purely partisan political crap coupled with our free-press-with-no-responsibility Jimmy Olsen type self-serving make-a-name-for-MYSELF reporting, is killing our soldiers by demoralizing them and moralizing the enemy, literally.
Stop it. For god sake stop the F_ing politicing of this war.
PS: This rant is not directed at Marc or any commenter in particular here. It is directed at the overall political climate in Washington and the sad negative effects it has on our country, especially at a time we need unity in a task bigger than ourselves, as McCain would say.
November 15th, 2005 at 7:10 am
I think we should be on orange alert.
November 15th, 2005 at 8:10 am
I never like it when the press takes a statement of a Republican and says, “…in other words.” Well, if there were other words or better words, then those would have been used.
It takes a leap of undeserved disdain to say that the President’s statements border on labeling citizens as traitors. It also is a mistake to infer that if 57% of the people believe something, then that 57% is right. Maybe 57% are stupid or easily deceived by the Democrats and their willing press.
It’s best to stick with what is said rather than an interpretation, and it’s best to stick with what is factual rather than opinions solicited from people with incomplete and inaccurate data. Marc’s interpretation and the polls don’t adequately or correctly reflect reality.
President Bush has every right and a duty to correct misrepresentations affecting the course of our country. Citizens have a right to hear the President without his remarks being falsely slanted.
November 15th, 2005 at 8:21 am
Marc C: “But if you do, you’re undermining our troops and giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
Sorry, my conservative friends, but this is filth. ”
Marc, you’re very very wrong.
The Pres. is mostly right on his point about the re-writing of history by Dems, as you later point out. But on the “comfort to the enemy” you are unwilling to confront the truth about aysmetric Free Speech–political attacks against the US President, and against the US policy, DO give aid and comfort to the enemy.
There is a Moral Hazard to free speech.
The N. Viet general kept fighting after his battle losses in Tet because of the pro-commie (=anti-war) success in the US protests. Many hundreds of thousands of S. Vietnamese were murdered because of the successful anti-war protests, which DID give the commie generals comfort. 400 00 – 700 000 human beings murdered, because of the success of the Leftist anti-war policy.
(US Leftists don’t care much — when 700 000 were murdered thanks to Clinton’s “no genocide” 1994 Rwanda policy, the US re-elected him. The press only seems to care about murders if they can blame it on US action–”see how bad the US is…”)
Free Speech is not free. More US soldiers will die because of free speech than would die if the press would censure itself and only report US/ Coalition success, and terrorist attrocities; which could be called “PR for war”. Similarly, even more would die if the press were to report only terrorist success and US failure, “PR for terrorists”.
“Against war” is not a real alternative; it implicitly supports terrorists, while dishonestly claiming not to. (“against Bush” implicitly means against Reps, in favor of the leading Dem, so it IS a real, though still unspecified, alternative.)
The Press continuum:
PR for war; balanced; PR for terrorists.
My own arbitrary measure in US soldier lives lost (by Nov 2005):
600 … 1200 … 2400.
The fact that we’re now over 2000 indicates to me how the anti-Bush press is skewed in support of terrorists. [I support the Balanced free press, but accept more US soldiers are killed with such.]
Finally Marc, you repeat the LIE: “endless war,” when it’s pretty clear to all that an elected Iraqi government is getting stronger every week. What is your definition of an “end” — a week, or month, or year, with no US soldier killed by hostile action? Some other standard? Naturally, like most Leftists, you don’t have a standard.
Casualties since the US starting fighting in Afghanistan are still much less per year than the loss of life due to Clinton’s intel failure (uncorrected by Bush) leading to 9/11. Without the US fighting, we would more likely be suffering more Madrid – London – WTC 1993 type attacks; a worse “war,” with more US civilians dying, than what has been going on.
You Dems should listen to Peter Beinhardt (?) — accept the goals of exporting democracy, but “do it right”. If that looks a lot like Bush’s policy, accept it. (War ends when there are no dictators.)
Fight his corruption — maybe all US gov’t grants need to be published on the internet. Calls for projects, project proposals, monitored measures, costs & profits & results. Join anti-UN Reps in calling for similar transparency at the UN; there are no secrets, or shouldn’t be.
Maybe get more US budget info easily available, especially at the company contract level.
Gas taxes are the right thing — but almost guaranteed electoral failure.
November 15th, 2005 at 8:36 am
Exactly right, Marc, on all counts. The question before the war was not if Iraq had illicit weapons. It was whether such weapons as might exist really posed a “mortal threat” that could not be dealt with except by military action. Both the Bush team and the Dems keep fudging this point to cover their behinds…though of course the Bush team has a bigger expanse to cover.
November 15th, 2005 at 9:55 am
Woody argues that if 57% of the public believe something that may just mean they are stupid and easily misled by wicked Democrats. I concur. The fact that a majority of voters went for Shrub in 2004 does not speak well for their intelligence and the fact that a majprity now tell pollsters that they regret that decision certainly does not absolve them of their monumental lack of judgement.
Liberty Daddy wants to refight the Vietnam War and this time, we’ll beat those pesky commies. As they used to say in the Commons, I refer the Gentleman to the Remarks I gave some moments ago. Let me just add here that we WOULD STILL be fighting there as the ARVN was a joke and its leaders were too busy getting money out of the country to Paris or to America to finance their new empire of liquour stores and nail parlours. Anyone who looked at it, including the US Army War College, has concluded that the war was a mug’s game we were best out of. And the best proof is the failure of the fominoes to fall. Before you bring up Cambodia remember that we pushed Sianouk out and he had kept Pol Pot in prison and impotent. And after ir was all over we backed the Khymer Rouge along with our buds the Chinese. But then we love to deal with the devil – Noriega, Saddam – when it suits us.
Bill Clinton was wrong not to intervene in Ruanda. But I sure didn’t hear any Repunlicans clamoring for it. Heard a lot about “wag the dog” though. Even when it was Osama. And the silence today from this administration over Darfur is deafening.
November 15th, 2005 at 9:58 am
From what I’ve read most of those outside the adminstration who suspected Iraq had WMD, suspected chemical and/or biological weapons, which would not pose the sort of threat nuclear weapons do. By fudging evidence on nuclear weapons and mushroom clouds, Bush and Co. upped the ante, making it harder to argue for continued containment. As I recall, the Dems in congress were the fudged, not the fudgers. I suspect some who voted for the war would have voted for it even without the fudge-job (many for cynical reasons). Others would have changed their vote. Lets be clear on who really mixed this gruesome batter — enough of the knee-jerk equivalancies.
November 15th, 2005 at 10:49 am
It’s so fun to watch Woody invert hinself like an old sock trying to shed the truth like it was a week’s worth of dirt.
Michael Turner, his folks won’t accept anything from Mindfully.org. I assure you of that and it doesn’t matter if a report is completely independent of the host site. It gives them an easy out. And a segway to character assasination, like with Wilson and Dr. James Hansen of NASA on his climate predictions. I interviewed Hansen on those charges and based on both sides claims find his correct and the other fraudulent and delberately deceptive propaganda. Woody and Roper subscribe to this hook line and gulp.. sinker. That’s the winger way on any issue.
Anyone could see the cooked case in Iraq based on blind and selective belief at the time. The decision had been made early on, any excuse was enough true or not.
And now Bush squirms as he should.
November 15th, 2005 at 10:54 am
Oh and Woody when you and your buddy charge innaccurate data against someone, you’d better be able to back it up legally. Charges like that can come back to haunt you even if all it is is data you don’t want to see, that’s true.
November 15th, 2005 at 11:32 am
Maybe they’re just psychos, have character flaws and blind spots.
Keeerist!
November 15th, 2005 at 11:51 am
Blind spots? The horror.
November 15th, 2005 at 12:04 pm
Or libelous fiction, such as charging writers with a lack of academic credentials by inventing a lowball number of pertinent coursework on degrees, and things of that nature. Circumstantial ad hominems related to published works, based on status, schools attended and other related character slurs. These things can determined by reasonable readers as defamatory to writers doing business online and can inflict real loss.
You may want to cease and desist, increase your blogger libel coverage, or continue at your own risk. Your choice.
Of course pointing out two prominent WSJ writers don’t have any degree is a statement of fact in contrast.
November 15th, 2005 at 12:05 pm
Let’s try and keep the thread to 3-4 comments per person. Unless some virgin territory is breached.
November 15th, 2005 at 12:18 pm
Jeez, Woody, how complicated was the quote from Bush? (1)The Dems are wrong, we did not mislead them, they knew what we knew; and (2)people who contend we misled them are giving aid and comfort to the enemy, and endangering our troops.
You can agree with #1, and think that the 57% that believe we were misled are fools. That does not justify what came next. His second contention is vile and, if I may, typical Republican poison. Joe McCarthy may not have invented it, but he did hone it and hand it down, even unto the present generation of plastic patriots.
November 15th, 2005 at 12:18 pm
Randy Paul and Mark A. York, your responses here are off topic, personal affronts, often false, boring, and lack class. It’s time to give it up.
I can’t say why Marc puts up with you; but, I won’t, and my only contacts with you will be to correct your false statements and stop your smears against G.M. and myself. I was told that if you wrestle with pigs, both of you get dirty and the pig likes it. Well, I don’t like to get dirty, so go find some of your own kind to attack.
If anyone else has a constructive response to my earlier remarks, then I will be glad to consider your comments.
November 15th, 2005 at 12:59 pm
holy moly, is this a blog or a chat room? take it outside you guys.
November 15th, 2005 at 1:04 pm
Final warning. Everyone back into their corners. Mark York, if you can’t put up with Woody’s and GM’s comments, then please take it somewhere else. This is not an issue of who’s right or wrong, nor do I frankly care. This is an issue of keeping the blog readable. You are free to fight with whoever you please… that’s why God made email. But your personal conflicts with other commenters are a crashing bore to everyone else. I appreciate the effort and time you put in participating on this baord, but you’re about participate yourself right out of it. You got something to someone here, other than to rebut an argument, take it out the back door please.
I’ve had it.
November 15th, 2005 at 1:20 pm
Jim Russel says:
Of course the president embellished the significance
of the Intel at hand in order to deal with the middle
east menace, while our troops were in the area and
the weather time frame, both in Washington and actually
on the ground, was limited. You have to be naive not
to know this.
I do have sympathy with this VERY realpolitik viewpoint — it’s not easy to march a democracy to war. Probably you do have to lie to get your way. Or “embellish” – I feel that lie and distort are applicable in this case, but whatever.
Here’s where the realpolitik argument leads. Once Bush marched the nation in to war by “embellishing,” Bush owns the problem. If he addresses the problem successfully, then it’s back to “no harm, no foul”. (That’s realpolitik for you.)
But instead, he has screwed up the prosecution of the war that he brought the nation in to. And then realpolitik comes back to bite him on the ass. Because it demands results. It just so happens that the means to enforce the demands of realpolitik are readily at hand — the lies that started the whole escapade off.
And you would have to be naive not to see how these lies, so plentiful and familiar by this point, are rightly being used to cripple Bush.
November 15th, 2005 at 1:31 pm
Great post, Marc.
Michael Balter,
Long term, I think you’re right on. We definitely need a third, more progressive party and what better place to build one than in that political laboratory known as California. On a national level, I think a third party would undermine progressive values without gaining any added representation. Progressives do not want to tilt away from the mainstream Dems and get saddled with another Bush. If your only purpose is to shift Dems leftward, that can be done most effectively at the local/state level. If you want to build the machinery to truly create a new effective party, well that’s done locally as well.
November 15th, 2005 at 2:15 pm
A Gun Isn’t A Gun If It Isn’t Loaded….
It’s tough for that argument to hold water against the facts, but the tenacity of that argument sticking around is a testament to the lengths that the Democrats and the media has gone to continue distorting the facts and the Congressional Record on t…
November 15th, 2005 at 2:47 pm
My apologies. I’ll keep responses topic specific. Like that last distortion from A Blog For All. This type of “Great Explainer” shuts down all discussion anyway. Which perhaps is best.
November 15th, 2005 at 9:19 pm
“if Gore had won in 2000 and made the same perfectly reasonable decisions Bush made after 9/11? ”
Bullshit…bullshit….bullshit. If Al Gore had launched a half-hearted attempt to get bin Laden – as Bush did – he would have been excoriated, as he would have had he pulled a bait and switch. Frankly this disingenuous crap – “everybody believed Saddam had WMDs” – as a rationale for specuolative pre-emption which has, predictably, proven disastrous – is making me want to puke. There were so many rational arguments against Bush’s “logic” and so much counter-evidence to the idea that Saddam had a weapons capability that threatened us or that he was in league with al Qaeda, that anyone who argues that “everybody believed what We (the half-assed, WRONG, war supporters) believed” is just monumentally full of shit. Cut the crap…take some fucking responsibilit, dammit. And acknowledge that some of us KNEW this was a mistake strategically and not even close to a “necessity”. I’ve had it with this attempt to snowball bullshit…anybody who saw that punk Ken Mehlman try to pull this crap off on Sunday’s MTP should just go crawl in a hole rather than echo his pathetic blather.
November 15th, 2005 at 9:36 pm
This is how sorry the pro-war shit has gotten – The first paragraph of Christopher Hitchens (supposedly not an idiot) defending the fugitive fraudster (the least of his crimes, so far as the Jordanian indictment for bank fraud is concerned), Ahmed Chalabi, over at Slate -
“What do you have to believe in order to keep alive your conviction that the Bush administration conspired to launch a lie-based war? As with (I admit) the pro-war case, the ground of argument has a tendency to shift. I saw two examples in Washington last week. An exceptionally moth-eaten and shabby picket line outside Ahmad Chalabi’s event on Wednesday featured a man with a placard alleging that Bush had prearranged the 9/11 attacks.”
Why does that remind me of the Tom Waits line “The piano has been drinking, not me.” ???
November 15th, 2005 at 9:43 pm
Just so no one accuses me of withholding the #2 example the towering intellect, Mr. Hitchens, provides, here’s his money quote:
“We did not know and could not know, until after the invasion, of Saddam’s plan to buy long-range missiles off the shelf from Pyongyang, or of the centrifuge components buried on the property of his chief scientist, Dr. Mahdi Obeidi.”
Yeah, the centrifuge in the rose garden! Unbelievable. And a “plan” to buy missiles “off the shelf” from Pyongyang. Have the pro-war morons no shame ? I guess when you’ve helped kill a bunch of our kids because you’re an idiot it’s painful to confront the truth.
November 15th, 2005 at 9:52 pm
Further, via Americablog, we’ve got a sorry little shit who’s melting down under the pressure of his own incompetence in charge. (Where is a relatively stable, intelligent, honest fellow like Richard Nixon when the GOP needs him?)
(clip) The Washington Times, you may know, is an “independent” newspaper that is basically the mouthpiece of the Republican party. For that reason, it sometimes gets inside scoops as to what the GOP is thinking, and even what’s going on inside the White House. For that reason, their latest story on Bush is extremely disturbing:
“{President Bush feels betrayed by several of his most senior aides and advisors and has severely restricted access to the Oval Office, administration sources say. The president’s reclusiveness in the face of relentless public scrutiny of the U.S.-led war in Iraq and White House leaks regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame has become so extreme that Mr. Bush has also reduced contact with his father, former President George H.W. Bush, administration sources said on the condition of anonymity.”
Matt Drudge adds on his site:
” The sources said Mr. Bush maintains daily contact with only four people: first lady Laura Bush, his mother, Barbara Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes. The sources also say that Mr. Bush has stopped talking with his father, except on family occasions.”
Whoopee…God I’m proud to be in the 57% !!!!!
November 15th, 2005 at 10:24 pm
Woody writes:
“Casualties since the US starting fighting in Afghanistan are still much less per year than the loss of life due to Clinton’s intel failure (uncorrected by Bush) leading to 9/11. ”
Even the low-ball estimates of the number of Iraqi noncombatants killed in the U.S. invasion greatly exceed the combined total of 9/11 deaths and U.S. military casualties so far. And I’m not even counting how many Iraqis have died in the insurgency since then. Somehow this doesn’t figure into Woody’s calculations.
“Without the US fighting, we would more likely be suffering more Madrid – London – WTC 1993 type attacks; a worse “war,†with more US civilians dying, than what has been going on.”
Take the money being spent on Iraq ($1b/week, still?) and put it into rolling up terror networks and hardening civil defenses against further “Madrid – London – WTC 1993 type attacks”, and there would not only be fewer such attacks, there would probably be a lot of money left over. Money that might be spent on peaceful efforts at spreading democracy. But no, says,SecState Rice, our democratizing “vision” is “bolder” than that. Amazingly, she’s not considered by conservatives to be subject to any “moral hazard” (unlike citizens of a democracy exercising their right to free speech, and reporters their right to a free press), despite having had a U.S. oil supertanker named after her until that became a potential political liability.
Somehow, while reviewing the arguments and counterarguments around the case for a beneficent American Empire (Max Boot, among others), I found myself reading essays on the Monthly Review website, arguing that the Left has made a mistake in coming to regard “Imperialism” as an embarassing word. These essays rehash Lenin’s argument that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, and argue that globalized monopoly (I would say “oligopoly”) capitalism can’t be seen as distinct from imperialism, when capital starts roving the globe, seeking ever-diminishing investment opportunities, primarily in cheap foreign labor markets and underexploited natural resources. I wouldn’t have felt at all receptive to the argument, except that I was fresh from reading about the torrential inflows of capital into China (much of which is being feverishly and irrationally squandered) and into hedge funds (likewise). Capital is roving the globe, and kidding itself.
I consider myself a fan of liberal democracy, but suddenly the massive U.S. “investment” in Iraq and its massive overinvestment in China — a country still run by shrewd Marxist-Leninists who take a very long view indeed — seemed all of a piece, taken together with the U.S. trade imbalance, the massive deficits, a U.S. savings rate near zero while the Baby Boom ages toward retirement, oil prices high on jitters about the stability of supply. Alan Greenspan, on the eve of retirement, has dropped his characteristic equivocation and issued some serious warnings, the most serious since his “irrational exuberance” comment (and we all know how that turned out.) Marx wasn’t the first to note that bourgeois democracy’s Achilles Heel was the ability of the people to vote themselves money.
Before we go exporting the democracy we’ve got, maybe we need to make sure that we would really be doing the world a favor. We went into a “bold” experiment in democracy-export with a popular consent manufactured from a tissue of lies, and that’s no feature of democracy that you’d eve
November 15th, 2005 at 10:45 pm
Woody writes:
“Casualties since the US starting fighting in Afghanistan are still much less per year than the loss of life due to Clinton’s intel failure (uncorrected by Bush) leading to 9/11. ”
Even the low-ball estimates of the number of Iraqi noncombatants killed in the U.S. invasion greatly exceed the combined total of 9/11 deaths and U.S. military casualties so far. And I’m not even counting how many Iraqis have died in the insurgency since then. Somehow these deaths figure into Woody’s calculations.
“Without the US fighting, we would more likely be suffering more Madrid – London – WTC 1993 type attacks; a worse “war,†with more US civilians dying, than what has been going on.”
Take the money being spent on Iraq ($1b/week, still?) and put it into rolling up terror networks and hardening civil defenses against further “Madrid – London – WTC 1993 type attacks”, and there would not only be fewer such attacks, there would probably be a lot of money left over. Money that might be spent on peaceful efforts at spreading democracy. But no, says,SecState Rice, our democratizing “vision” is “bolder” than that. Amazingly, she’s not considered by conservatives to be subject to any “moral hazard” (unlike citizens of a democracy exercising their right to free speech, and reporters their right to a free press), despite having had a U.S. oil supertanker named after her until that became a potential political liability.
Somehow, while reviewing the arguments and counterarguments around the case for a beneficent American Empire (Max Boot, among others), I found myself reading essays on the Monthly Review website, arguing that the Left has made a mistake in coming to regard “Imperialism” as an embarassing word. These essays rehash Lenin’s argument that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, and argue that globalized monopoly (I would say “oligopoly”) capitalism can’t be seen as distinct from imperialism, when capital starts roving the globe, seeking ever-diminishing investment opportunities, primarily in cheap foreign labor markets and underexploited natural resources. I wouldn’t have felt at all receptive to the argument, except that I was fresh from reading about the torrential inflows of capital into China (much of which is being feverishly and irrationally squandered) and into hedge funds (likewise). Capital is roving the globe, and kidding itself that it’s going to find some pot of gold.
I consider myself a fan of liberal democracy, but suddenly the massive U.S. “investment” in Iraq and its massive overinvestment in China — a country still run by shrewd Marxist-Leninists who take a very long view indeed — seemed all of a piece, taken together with the U.S. trade imbalance, the massive deficits, a U.S. savings rate near zero while the Baby Boom ages toward retirement, oil prices high on jitters about the stability of supply. Alan Greenspan, on the eve of retirement, has dropped his characteristic equivocation and issued some serious warnings, the most serious since his “irrational exuberance” comment (and we all know how that turned out.) Will these warnings be heeded any more than they were last time? Marx wasn’t the first to note that bourgeois democracy’s Achilles Heel was the ability of the people to vote themselves money.
Before we go exporting the democracy we’ve got, maybe we need to make sure that we would really be doing the world such a big favor. We went into a “bold” experiment in democracy-export with a popular consent manufactured from a tissue of lies, and that’s no feature of democracy that you’d ever want to advertise, is it? To forthrightly point this out may be treason in some view, but if this be treason …. it’s treason in the name of giving American democracy one of the routine housecleanings it needs. Kurt Vonnegut, not too long after we declared victory and retreated in the first Gulf War, said that American society had become like a party where everyone is having such a good time that they feel it would be impolite to mention the bad smell coming from under the floorboards. Well, the party is decidedly over, and the bad smell isn’t exactly going to sell our House Beautiful as a model for real estate subdivisions stretching to the horizon. To throw open the windows hoping to catch a breeze is no solution — winter always comes again, and we don’t want to be proving Lenin right when it does.
November 15th, 2005 at 10:46 pm
“Somehow these deaths figure into Woody’s calculations.”
Obviously, there should be a “don’t” in there.
November 15th, 2005 at 11:32 pm
I really think that Washington TIMES story, cited by Reg, deserves more comment. The Moonie Paper is the house organ of the GOP Right Wing and to present this portrait of Shrub is really scary. We are getting into Fruedian territory here. And three more years?
November 16th, 2005 at 6:17 am
Very thoughtful post, Marc. I believe you raise, perhaps unintentionally, a larger issue. How do we guard ourselves against demagogic appeals to military prowess and loyalty to the troops IN ADVANCE, given that every human society known to history automatically slavers at this sort of red meat? Can we think of any polity comprised of homo sapiens that did NOT act in exactly this way when an opportunistic leader thought to turn himself into a hero by leading the nation into war for good or bad reasons? I’d like to hear about it, if so. As we witness further descent into misery and chaos produced by this ill-conceived Iraq adventure, is there any way to engrave its lessons into our brains and those of future generations so that this stupidly self-serving policy is not simply repeated 30 years from now?
November 16th, 2005 at 6:56 am
“is there any way to engrave its lessons into our brains and those of future generations so that this stupidly self-serving policy is not simply repeated 30 years from now?”
The terrible irony, tim, is that line reads as a great epitaph to the Vietnam War, circa 1975.
November 16th, 2005 at 7:23 am
First of all, to have earned a response from two of the most thoughtful, smart, and articulate commentors on MarcsBlog is a high complement to any rant. But as MT and Reg have pointed out, my opinion can sometimes be wrong.
Reg used the word ‘disingenuous’, which is the nice way of saying ‘not totally honest’. Believe me Reg, every word I say I am being totally genuine about what I believe at the time I say it, but I may be wrong by mistake and an open mind can be changed by correction. As Marc often reminds us, I don’t look at my voter reg card before I respond. I do have a conservative bias. and for the life of me I don’t know why. Because I came from a very poor single family home of six, when the only welfare available was surplus gov’t beans, cheese and flour. I’m beginning to think there’s a political gene we’re born with and can’t help. Anyway Reg, I know from the passion of your arguments you are absolutely genuine. My main problem is with the lifers in Rome that cannot be and keep their jobs.
MT, in his usual very convincing way, converted my word ‘embellished’ to ‘lied’. This is where the line in the political sand is drawn. One side has a more positive attitude of the true intent of Bush, and I would like to extend that to all presidents who reach the pinnacle of political office, and I truly believe do what they think is the best for the country when it comes to big issues like war. Clinton did it in Kosovo and Yugoslavia under the stupid Washington partisan resistance by Republicans. Wag the dog, etc ignorance. Remember?
I firmly believe Bush embellished the ‘significance’ of the intel and likely did not exercise enough due diligence to determine its credibility, but certainly did not embellish or lie about the evidence itself. And I believe his behavior was driven by a belief it was an opportune time and absolutely necessary to deal with the long term and ongoing Saddam menace, with no other ‘final’ solution in site.
I would like to now ask MT and Reg to address the issue I raised regarding what to do now. If you agree we as a country, for our own safety and self interest, cannot leave Iraq unprepared to handle the Islam crazies and Saddam loyalists by themselves, then does it not make sense to encourage unity in or own country in order to discourage the impression we are definitely leaving that the crazies can win here, if they can’t win there by being totally butal to the targeted innocent population or their own people. Disgusting behavior that ‘must be DEFEATED’.
November 16th, 2005 at 8:52 am
I think that the only people who can defeat the al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq are the Iraqis. Just because the U.S. created a problem, doesn’t mean that we can solve it. There seems to be, literally, a rock and hard place thing happening, whereby the occupation itself multiplies the problems it’s also trying to resolve. The one thing I believe we can count on is that the Bush Gang will consistently find a way to make things worse. Check out George Packer’s Assassin’s Gate. Packer was a pro-war guy, but his reporting from both the Beltway and the front is amazing. Suffice to say that the Bush administration has even managed to disappoint me in the way they’ve pulled this one off. If there’s a way of saving face and some semblance of self-determination for most Iraqis, fine. But it might just be getting the hell out of their way and letting them settle their own scores. That and preparing to live with a Shiite-dominated Gulf region wherein we’ve assurred the Iranians of a very compatible long-term ally in southern Iraq. Now had that been put forth as the probable outcome of this war by the Beltway Bush Boys, how many heads would be on poles ???? But as I’ve stated before – most of the really hard questions about the future of Iraq, I don’t know the answer to. The bad news is that neither do the people who’ve been charged with the responsibility of coming up with a plan for this thing…and they haven’t since Day One when people like me who thought it was far more complicated than we were being told were routinely excoriated as wimps and worse…I really wish I had, in fact, turned out to be just some idiot carping on the sidelines without a clue while wise men with expertise were doing what needed to be done. No such luck.
November 16th, 2005 at 11:03 am
Michael Turner, you have three comments in a row blasting me for comments that someone else made. You should know by now that my positions are usually solid. I feel so hurt.
November 16th, 2005 at 12:14 pm
Not off topic at all, just hoisting you by your own petard.
But I’ll stop. In any case, consider what Chuck Hagel said at the Council on Foreign Relations yesterday:
He’s a Republican, by the way. The administration has used criticism of its policies as a brickbat against its critics by attacking their patriotism or claiming that it hurts the country. I first remember this happening when John Ashcroft made his opening remarks before the Senate on the “unlawful combatants”/military tribunals designation, stating that (and I’m paraphrasing here) such comments weaken our resolve and play into the ahnds of the terrorists> The difference now, as witnessed by the president’s tobogganesque poll numbers, the public is not buying.
November 16th, 2005 at 1:45 pm
Jim Russell –
I think it’s not all that helpful to try to get into Bush’s head and postulate reasons for why he did what he did to get us into this war. But whatever it was, embellished does not cover it. He and his cronies waged a concerted campaign of disinformation and intimidation. It still might have had a net positive impact…but no such luck.
In addition to the consequences in Iraq, think about the state of civil liberties here (loss of habeus corpus is something conservatives should be worried about, and when these serious erosions have happened over the history of country, they have later been regarded as hysterical mistakes – I’m thinking about the 1950s and the 1920s and as far back as the Alien and Sedition acts). Also, think about the loss of trust of our natural international allies in what might should have been described as a “campaign against terror” rather than a “war on terror”.
I’m just pointing out that there is more than Iraq on the table here, and the current governing crew has run it all into a ditch. Like Reg, I do wish that things had not gone so radically bad. (Just to say I’m serious here, some of my own work comes from government grants which have contracted since the government has been mismanaged to this point.)
About personal perspectives on the war, of course I knew that Bush was (at least partly) lying before it began. I took a lot of heat from my more radical friends for being agnostic about the war. Basically, I decided that if Bush felt he needed to take this one on, I was not going to stand on a street corner protesting it.
Well, I wish now that I had. This crew can’t manage a freaking lemonade stand.
And because of this, I think that it’s true that the sooner we get out, the better.
November 16th, 2005 at 5:00 pm
Reg, Vietnam was exactly what I had in mind, and I am old enough to recognize the similarities.
November 16th, 2005 at 7:58 pm
Michael Turner, it is Tom Grey that you complain about, not Woody (me).
Marc’s post is talking US & world press. The US press reports, relentlessly, on US soldier casualty figures. It does NOT report so much on Iraqi figures. Nor does it report on the mass graves of Saddam; nor have there been much reports on exactly how many kids were actually being starved by those nasty sanctions.
Nor on French cars being torched, unless there are really a “lot” — and about hundred on a Saturday night isn’t.
Nor does the press report on the monthly, weekly, daily disaster in Darfur — now being “handled” by the UN and the ICC. I really wish Bush would point out how he is allowing the Dem idea of “International Law” (w/ Chinese veto) to contain the non-genocide (UN said so) in Darfur.
Bush & Powell called it genocide, the UN doesn’t (nor does Amnesty nor HRW) — no genocide, no required action; little action other than words (53? indictments, most not served).
I don’t want to fight Vietnam again — I want to point out the reality of what the anti-war folk WERE IN FAVOR OF.
The choice was more US War or genocide.
John O’Neil, like most anti-commies, WAS saying Vietnam would be a bloodbath if the US left. Kerry disagreed, claiming only some 2-3 000 S. Vietnamese would likely be murdered when the commies took over. (See their 1972 debate)
The US should have supported S. Vietnam forces, who by 1972 were slowly getting better; reports of their incompetnece were based on early 1967 incompetence. Much like the Iraqi forces in Fallujah I (April 2004) were still a bit of a joke.
The terrorists are not laughing at Iraqi forces — and Reg, I’m glad you realize that only Iraqis can win in Iraq. That’s the timeline — the US stays until the elected Iraqi gov’t has created a security force able and willing to enforce security. Those Iraqi elections haven’t happened yet. But they should be here in December.
Great, rapid progress. But not fast enough for Leftist Bush-haters who claim such junk as: “This crew can’t manage a freaking lemonade stand.”
Clinton in Somalia; Carter with Iran — Bush looks pretty good in comparison to me. (Clinton does give better “talking head”)
November 16th, 2005 at 8:19 pm
I guess it depends on how one defines lie. If it’s he knew it was wrong, I doubt it. If you consider the a priori decision to go in then yes, it’s a cooked case, and much more than data massage. This was data recesutation.
Cheney has mislead and lied all the way. Misinformation is still propaganda in shades of gray.
November 16th, 2005 at 8:26 pm
Grey let’s get one thing straight here: this so-called hatred is a wingnut invention. No one here has uttered this word. We disagree with this favorite anointed son. That’s not hate, although you are creeping close to that mark with your insane shillery. Somalia? That’s a kindergarten party compared to what Iraq looks like to me. Iran? Reagan harvested an already plowed field. Like the rest of you wingnuts you can’t find your ass with both hands because your head is in the way.
November 16th, 2005 at 8:32 pm
Bush & Powell called it genocide, the UN doesn’t (nor does Amnesty nor HRW) — no genocide, no required action; little action other than words (53? indictments, most not served).
It’s the same Bush who is trying to quash the bipartisan Darfur Accountability Act.
At least the ICC is doing something. Bush called it genocide and did nothing.
November 16th, 2005 at 9:52 pm
“Michael Turner, you have three comments in a row blasting me for comments that someone else made. You should know by now that my positions are usually solid. I feel so hurt. ”
That was truly idiotic of me. Sorry.
Jim Russell (NOT Woody, Not Tom Grey) writes:
“I would like to now ask MT and Reg to address the issue I raised regarding what to do now. If you agree we as a country, for our own safety and self interest, cannot leave Iraq unprepared to handle the Islam crazies and Saddam loyalists by themselves, then does it not make sense to encourage unity in or own country in order to discourage the impression we are definitely leaving that the crazies can win here, if they can’t win there by being totally butal to the targeted innocent population or their own people. Disgusting behavior that ‘must be DEFEATED’.”
Well, fresh on the heels of Jim’s request comes the news that Iraqi prisons undoubtedly contain “disappeared”, beaten, tortured prisoners. Disgusting behavior that must be defeated too, I suppose, but it’s a lot harder to defeat tacitly-outsourced Abu Ghraibs. The nominal government of Iraq has voiced its own disgust, and promised to address the situation, but I wonder how much power they have over the local militia forces — stronger by the day — who are running these prisons? And how much legitimacy can the U.S bring to bear on the problem at this point? Especially with all the moral authority that comes of the U.S. extraordinary rendition program. Jordanians march in the streets against the “crazies” of Zarqawi, but under the watch of Jordanian secret police, who also participate in the extraordinary rendition program. Popular support in Jordan for anti-terrorism is likely to simply shore up the forces of its police state.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m a fan of liberal democracy, the rule of law, majority rule with constitutional protections of minority rights; I think it’s the best a society can hope for. But in grappling with evil in certain ways, you only get infected with it. “Our own safety and self interest” isn’t that temporary security for which we should never sacrifice our own liberty. If there were some way to truly and rapidly spread, through military force, what the West has slowly, painstakingly, evolved over centuries, I think it would be worth suffering a 9/11 a year, or worse, for a decade or more. But I seriously doubt that it’s politically possible — either at home or abroad. Defeating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was largely a matter of putting former liberal democracies back into some kind of working order. Taisho Period Japan and Weimar Germany were far from perfect, but they were egitimate, indigenous expressions of those nations’ respective peoples for a system resembling ours. Iraq is hardly even a proper nation, much less a nation with some history of unity under something like liberal democracy. Condoleezza Rice has admitted that it might be 40 years before we know whether the Iraq gamble was worth it. What is 40 years of the present course going to turn us into? That’s a question of our “safety” and “self-interest” too, isn’t it, in some more transcendent sense?
Bush never spoke truer words than when he admitted that America had tolerated a serious foreign policy flaw: growing dependence on dictatorships for its oil supply. My problem with what we’re doing in Iraq is that his cure may be worse than the disease — both for the “Greater Middle East” and for ourselves.
Maybe America needs its own spiritual Jihad. Maybe it needs ministers calling from behind its pulpits for a show of hands from the congregation: “How many of you filled your gas tank this week courtesy of regimes that deny their subjects basic human rights?” Then roaring afterward, “The rest of you are LYING! And which of the Ten Commandments did you just break?” Perhaps that roar should be followed by another question: “How many of you believe that breaking another commandment — Thou Shalt Not Kill — is OK, when it’s in support of an effort to break the bonds of tyranny in a foreign country, an effort that that even its leaders admit might not work, an effort those might only strengthen those tyrannical bonds in the long run, while making us weaker as a nation?” To whatever scattered show of hands might be seen in the wake of that question, the ministers might merely mumble, “Well, I suppose reasonable people can disagree on that point,” and swing into some cheerier Sunday sermon. Repeated often enough, and the whiff of fumes from the service station nozzle might start to evoke the appropriate nausea. Videotaped beheadings? Disgusting behavior that must be DEFEATED. Zarqawi’s slaughter of Shi’ites? Disgusting behavior that must be DEFEATED. Going for joyrides in the countryside after church, gliding along on Saudi gasoline? Well … you tell me.
November 16th, 2005 at 10:55 pm
Mark York writes:
“Like the rest of you wingnuts you can’t find your ass with both hands because your head is in the way.”
Mark, do you need to be reminded of a promise you made on this very thread? Mea culpa and all that — I sometimes stoop so low myself, but I don’t consider myself any less to blame just because the temptations are so great. Nobody wins with this kind of rhetoric. Faith in reasoned discourse and its potential to persuade can be hard to maintain, but please at least try. Reserve your withering scorn not for the speaker, but what has been spoken. Attacking lies rather than those who happen to believe them may be harder work, but it’s a lot more satisfying for you — and edifying for the rest of us — in the end. You don’t have the strength at the moment? Then at least keep your powder dry.
November 17th, 2005 at 8:46 am
Thanks for your response MT.
A couple of quick things, you said “I think it’s not all that helpful to try to get into Bush’s head and postulate reasons for why he did what he did to get us into this war.” Agreed, but I hope you can understand it is not fair to ask for unilateral disarmament when there is so much negative postulation in Washington about what was is in Bush’s head, even when he himself disagrees with them. It’s just my opinion.
Another, you said “It(the war) still might have had a net positive impact…but no such luck.” It is having a positive impact Michael and in a very short time frame. Iraq is moving very quickly, as democracies go, forward and away from civil war. Syria is out of Lebanon and on the run as far as public opinion goes. Israel and Palestine is making good progress toward
separate and democratic states. Terrorists tactics against other countries, Jordan being the latest, is pointing out to the rest of the world just how serious this problem is and is having a solidifying effect in favor of our democratic effort in Iraq.
Bush’s plan for dealing with this scourge is a long range one. Democracy in the Middle East.
Afghanistan was the obvious first place to begin. Iraq was the next most obvious place to deal with. Condoleezza Rice, in her presentation before the Foreign Relation Committee, did an excellent job of laying it out. From the changes we have seen in the Middle East already, I believe it is working, and in a shorter time frame than one could expect.
November 17th, 2005 at 1:05 pm
Well it’s all in the ideas isn’t it? But if Jonah Goldberg can use moonbat in mainstream publications anything is fair game. I would draw the line at needless profanity for which “Ass” is hardly at the apex.
November 17th, 2005 at 6:40 pm
Tom Grey says:
>> Great, rapid progress. But not fast enough for
>> Leftist Bush-haters who claim such junk as:
>> “This crew can’t manage a freaking lemonade stand.â€
Actually, I’m neither a Leftist nor a Bush-hater.
I cancelled my subscription to The Nation (gave it away to a friend, actually) after its beside-the-point reaction to 9/11. I read Hitchens’ pro-war essays and found them persuasive (not wholly so – I did not support the war, just did not work to oppose it, and argued the pro-war position with some of my very pre-convinced anti-war friends).
I would say I have a more finely tuned sense of the limitations of Bush, but certainly not hate. I simply did not know that the Peter Principle could be applied so many times serially to the same person. He’s way out of his depth.
January 18th, 2006 at 10:29 am
Interesting post. I stumbled across your blog whilst searching for info on Madrid. best of luck with your blog.
May 21st, 2006 at 10:25 am
visa gift cards…
silts humility?reviled,studios mounting,ascribed Staten erring.steadfastly.visa card http://www.credit-card-4u.us/ …
September 20th, 2006 at 3:26 am
good job…
Think you are on track with this post…
January 27th, 2007 at 3:56 am
Craps…
dusts comprehend!pawns nouns!Ludlow Roulette [url=http://www.atroulette.com/#]Roulette[/url] http://www.atroulette.com/# …
November 15th, 2007 at 1:02 am
casinos video poker…
…
November 15th, 2007 at 3:03 am
jeu blackjack gratuit…
…
November 15th, 2007 at 7:12 am
kostenlose casinospiele…
Nehmen pai gow poker virtual casinos…
November 18th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
best casino uk best casino online…
Three free poker game online casino gamble…
November 20th, 2007 at 5:00 am
jugar poker omaha gratis…
…
December 7th, 2007 at 10:18 am
free mobile polyphonic ringtones info personal polyphonic remember ringtones…
I am download free ringtones verizon download free ringtones for verizon wireless phone…
December 14th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
free gambling money for online casino…
I am play bingo online gambling casino online…
December 20th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
française des jeux…
Here loan payday until payday loan application…
December 27th, 2007 at 9:16 am
The advance fax loan no payday coup handle rag slow blind spread cash advance detroit casino bingo house e315 motorola ringtones rank fish muck?
December 29th, 2007 at 11:30 am
It must be noted guerra phone vida wallpaper bracelet spread keno split door cell phone name wallpaper pocket bank cowboys finger nickel free boost real music ringtones rounder tough combinations craps!
January 7th, 2008 at 11:39 am
buy prepaid credit card…
In general cell free phone prepaid ringtones download free ringtones to pc…
January 8th, 2008 at 9:30 am
des règles du poker texas holdem…
Any kind of télécharger le jeu poker gratuit info motorola personal remember ringtones t731…
January 16th, 2008 at 9:33 am
mp3 ringtones for treo 650 650 mp3 palm ringtones treo 650 free mp3 ringtones treo…
Rare free motorola ringtones tracfone nextel i860 ringtones software…
January 20th, 2008 at 3:51 am
Mucho moniääniset soittoäänet Butterfaß Frontseite Weiß aktiv Wette real midi klingeltöne pasadena Spritzen händler free music real ringtones Köpfe Bezahlung Karten Angebote.
January 25th, 2008 at 10:54 am
download free kyocera ringtones…
Breathe nextel music ringtones totally free cell phone ringtones…
January 30th, 2008 at 2:04 am
télécharger poker texas holdem en ligne…
Thanks internet payday loan payday loan on line…
February 1st, 2008 at 11:41 am
Overall free polyphonic ringtone from verizon toke blackjack cancellation consecutive gratis klingeltöne zum downloaden post white rock pushka klingeltöne für base up foul surrender card ante!
February 2nd, 2008 at 1:15 am
cellular free phone ringtones sprint…
There 6061 free nokia ringtones free ringtones sprint totally…
February 2nd, 2008 at 2:50 am
Note that siti di poker on line pairs jackpot credit keno lottery dove giocare a poker middle slow bet poker sportivo gratis seconds grip blind?
February 2nd, 2008 at 4:59 pm
toque de magia…
As mentioned toque retal toque real gratis…
February 3rd, 2008 at 8:22 am
Questo guide de casino en ligne bluff à propos chausser nickel cas dehors telecharger jeux casino gratuits gestion gerber affûter casino online effacer rocher implicite transaction forcer à salle inclinaison!
February 15th, 2008 at 11:26 am
download free ringtones cell phone…
By means of cingular ringtones coupon cell download free phone ringtones…
March 7th, 2008 at 10:12 am
free nokia ringtones and logo…
In fact advance cash day loan pay free lg ringtones verizon wireless…
June 2nd, 2008 at 12:04 pm
texas holdem werte…
Sa casinos en ligne gratuites world poker series 2007 baccarat on line poker game gold casino…
June 9th, 2008 at 1:36 am
juegos de casino on line…
Chi strip poker game gratis online betting poker regole roulette jouer au poker gratuit sistemi per la roulette…
July 1st, 2009 at 7:36 am
Blog agradable, finalmente encontr? que el Info que buscaba.
October 23rd, 2010 at 6:16 pm
Thank you for the article and for creating a nice site. I have been searching for honest information on natural health and will put these recommendations to use. I have found it hard to find reliable ideas, as there are so many web sites with useless information. Definitely keep the good stuff flowing!